CET is a non-profit organization that helps households, small businesses, and communities decarbonize by implementing waste reduction, energy efficiency, and clean energy solutions. Their mission is to innovate, implement, and scale the environmental solutions that communities need to thrive. CET runs over 60 programs for state and federal agencies across the Northeast and beyond, all providing no-cost assistance to help people move further, faster, with taking climate action.
Masooma Rahmaty from YPCCC’s Partnerships Program had the opportunity to interview Ashley Muspratt, President and Chief Executive Officer at CET, to learn more about the organization’s climate work and partnerships with YPCCC.
Masooma: To start with, can you tell me a bit about yourself and your role at CET?
Ashley: I’ve been with CET about seven years and have moved through lots of different roles since joining. I started as a waste reduction consultant. Then I worked on our business development team. After that I was our Director of Innovation, and now I’m the CEO. Before joining CET, I had a very different career, but it was still in the environmental space. I worked in international development, on urban sanitation in Sub-Saharan Africa. After earning a Master’s in environmental engineering and a PhD in energy and resources, I moved to Ghana in West Africa, where I founded a company that designed and built reuse-oriented wastewater treatment systems. We were focused on recovering valuable resources from waste, be it nutrients or water or energy, as a way to finance the cost of treatment. I spent about eight years in Sub-Saharan Africa building wastewater treatment plants. I moved back to the US in 2017, and that’s when I happily stumbled into CET.
Masooma: Can you tell us a bit about how you got involved in climate work and what led you to where you are now?
Ashley: When I moved back to the U.S., I was interested in pivoting into U.S.-focused climate work. My academic training, particularly the PhD in energy and resources, was an interdisciplinary program, and it prepared me well to move into this space. I always joke that I came out of the womb as an environmental crusader. It’s just always been this innate calling for me to do environmental protection work, and I’ve always gravitated towards big, audacious problems. So, climate was kind of an obvious sector to move into.
I got lucky finding CET. It is headquartered in Northampton, the town where my family moved to, and they had an opening. Starting as a waste reduction consultant, I was able to pretty directly parlay my work in urban sanitation into that role. But since being with CET, I’ve done a lot more on the building decarbonization side. It’s been really fun for me to move into new disciplines and get to address new intellectual challenges.
Masooma: Could you tell me about CET’s mission, work, and how you use climate communication in your work?
Ashley: CET is a nearly 50-year-old nonprofit. Our 50th anniversary is next year, and our mission is to innovate, implement, and scale the environmental solutions that communities need to thrive. In practice, that looks like working directly with homeowners, households and businesses to identify opportunities to decarbonize their buildings and their operations. This includes things like implementing insulation or converting off fossil fuels or reducing waste, and then we hold their hands through to implementation. That type of hand-holding is a really key piece of it, trying to take the chaos out of climate action for people and trying to ease the burden.
We really stick with people to help them navigate different incentives that they have access to, different programs, helping them identify contractors, review quotes, and do post-installation inspections.
And it’s really in these one-on-one engagements with people where climate communication comes in. We have a mantra that we meet customers where they are. For some, it’s economics. What they’re most interested in are ways to save money. But particularly in the last five years, more and more people are motivated by decarbonization alone; that is their driving motivator. We’ve really been leaning a lot more into climate-forward communication in our outreach when we’re recruiting customers to participate in our programs.
We know from your publications that what Americans most want from climate experts is solutions. That is what we’re giving them: really tangible, practical things that they can do to their building shells, their mechanicals, or their operations to make a difference.
Masooma: Who are your key audiences, and how are you thinking about reaching them and engaging with them directly?
Ashley: In short, our audiences are homes and businesses. We work in 18 states, but primarily in the Northeast: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New York. We try to serve as a one-stop shop for people’s decarbonization needs. Customers will often come to us with one priority in mind. For example, they’ve gotten a notice of non-compliance from the MassDEP because they’re not recycling their cardboard. They need help from us in setting up a better recycling system. Great, we’ll help them set up a better system and then explore additional opportunities: food waste reduction, weatherization, or switching out an old furnace for a heat pump. Once someone connects with us, we try to stay with them and guide them through as many solutions as possible, based on their timeline and budget.
We are high-touch when it comes to working with people, and we have a number of different ways that we reach our audiences. With some of our programs, utilities are doing a lot of advertising, so we have a lot of natural, inbound demand on our phone lines for services. For other programs, we need to go and find the customers. So we’re doing cold calls, reaching out to certain types of businesses in specific geographies.
We also attend a lot of events. We try to be in the places where our target audience will be, restaurant association events, for example. For residential programs, we’re starting to table in places like Home Depot and Walmart, places where some of our target audience are likely to be shopping every Saturday or Sunday.
We have to get creative about finding people, because for most, weatherizing a building or diverting organics is not top of mind. We have to capture their attention and convince them that we can make this pretty easy for them, and they can save money, and there are going to be all these great co-benefits.
Masooma: You mentioned that your key audiences are households and businesses. Are there different types of messages that tend to resonate with each of these audiences?
Ashley: Definitely. And just to clarify, when I say households, that includes both homeowners and renters, so we are talking about single-family and multi-family homes. On the business side, we work with businesses of different sizes, from a small mom-and-pop or pizza joint to a college campus, or large institutions. Each of those customer groups is going to have different messages that appeal to them.
We try to hear from the customer what their pain points are and then tailor our responses to look at how we can address the pain. Is it a cost issue? Is it a comfort issue? Is it both? Is it a health issue?
Masooma: How has your organization used YPCCC’s resources and insights?
Ashley: I think one of the big ones is your “Ten Insights” email course and insights from “Climate Change in the American Mind”. Learning that there are different audience segments among the American public, the Six Americas, and understanding the spread of opinions, and how that’s changing over the last decade, is very helpful. We’ve seen this very clear shift in consensus in the U.S. around climate change being real, and more people being at least Concerned, often Alarmed about it. That is now the majority of Americans.
We know that we can lean into climate-forward language in a way that, a decade ago, we couldn’t. Now we just talk a lot more openly about decarbonization being a major motivation for this work. But of course, even if that is a priority for people, we still need to figure out how to set things up in a way that is cost-effective and accessible for everyone.
We’re really intentional about being inclusive in the design of our services, making sure that we have very accessible programming. And when we talk about how we communicate, not only is our message different in terms of climate sensitivity, but we also focus on cultural competence and tailoring our messages for different demographics and different communities. We put out communications in a number of different languages and speak with different groups.
Masooma: What do you think CET does well that other climate communicators could learn from?
Ashley: I think it is our focus on solutions. In some ways, this is by virtue of the nature of our work, but I think we do a good job of blending the urgency to act with very concrete steps people can take, and then we actually help them follow through.
I live in a very climate-forward town where residents support action on climate change, and yet even these committed residents have no idea where to start. So it’s just about being very clear about what you can do, from the really simple and free things, to the bigger undertakings. And then we give people bite-sized, approachable steps they can take.
Masooma: What has been the single most exciting or surprising discovery you made in communicating or organizing around climate?
Ashley: One of our most important discoveries is that to be effective in moving people from inaction to action, you first have to earn their trust. It’s not as simple as rattling off statistics about climate or explaining why heat pumps are great now. You really have to build trust.
I think many people are just trained to look for ulterior motives. Everything we do for customers is at no cost to them, and sometimes that actually makes it harder for us to gain their buy-in. People are like, “No, no, it’s not free. Where’s the catch?” Trust is essential, and we’ve found one of the best ways to build that is through partnerships. We partner with a variety of stakeholders to help create and deliver our messages.
Particularly when serving low-income communities or communities where English is a second language, we’ve found that working with local, community-based organizations or leaders who already have trust is essential. It allows us to quickly earn trust and effectively connect these communities with the benefits of whatever programs we are offering.
Another really effective approach, for all demographics and customer types, is peer-to-peer endorsements. Sort of like, don’t take our word for it; hear it from the restaurant down the street or your neighbor a few blocks over. It is social ground truthing. We create short, TikTok-friendly videos where people share great experiences, like how they accessed no-cost services or how much their energy bills have gone down. That kind of message is way more effective than us getting on a video and saying the same thing.
Masooma: How do you remain hopeful and inspired to build public will in the climate movement?
Ashley: Being a solution-based implementation organization gives me so much hope, because I see the progress we are making every day. I often say one of the things I love about working at CET is that I can quite literally measure my days in the tons of carbon we’ve mitigated, the number of people we’ve served, and the dollars we’ve saved. We can quantify these things and every day, we know we are making a tangible difference.
Particularly with the way emissions reduction goals are often communicated, it can be easy to fall into an all-or-nothing mindset and to think that if we’ve already passed 1.5 degrees, what’s the point? But that’s not how it works. Every incremental ton of carbon we prevent from entering the atmosphere makes a difference. That is why we focus on incremental change and reaching as many people as we can.
At the end of the day, climate change mitigation is about motivating hundreds of millions of individual decision-makers to make choices, to wake up and say, “Hey, I want to replace my furnace with a heat pump”, or “I’m ready to switch to an EV”. They have to choose to do those things because they see a real alternative. And we’re here to help them do exactly that.
We thank Ashley Muspratt and CET for sharing their time and perspective, and for their commitment to advancing accessible, community-based climate solutions.